Solution Architect

At Barclays, our architecture underpins how millions of people shop, travel, plan, and thrive. With our mobile banking app on more than 12 million phones.the solutions you design will directly influence how families buy their weekly groceries, book their dream holidays, or simply pay for a pint of milk at the corner shop. And when customers are struggling, the platforms you build help ensure we can step in with the right support at the right time.

This is an opportunity to apply modern architectural thinking to systems of genuine national importance. You’ll bring stewardship, engineering excellence and pragmatic leadership to work that truly matters — because when our customers cannot pay for essentials, it’s not only headline news, it’s something we take personally.

As one of the most senior technical figures on each piece of work, you’ll lead with confidence, clarity and care. You’ll champion scalability, stability and resilience. You’ll inspire teams, drive engineering rigour, and help set the tone for how modern architecture is delivered across the bank.

To be successful as a Solution Architect, you should have experience with:

• Architecting highly resilient, high‑performance and highly distributed systems — the kind you’d trust to look after your money.

• Influencing senior stakeholders and navigating tough technical decisions with confidence, clarity and strong architectural judgement.

• Designing transitional architectures that responsibly modernise heritage systems while keeping millions of UK customers running smoothly.

Some other highly valued skills may include:

• Deep functional or domain experience across Banking, Cards or Loans — ideally within platforms operating at national scale.

• Hands‑on expertise building cloud‑native, event‑driven or CQRS‑driven systems across AWS, Azure or GCP.

• Leading technical evaluations, driving engineering spikes or PoCs, and selecting technologies that raise the bar for the teams around you.

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.

This role will be based in our Knutsford or Northampton office.

Purpose of the role

To design, develop, and implement solutions to complex business problems, collaborating with stakeholders to understand their needs and requirements, and design and implement solutions that meet those needs and create solutions that balance technology risks against business delivery, driving consistency. 

Accountabilities

• Design and development of solutions as products that can evolve, meeting business requirements that align with modern software engineering practices and automated delivery tooling. This includes identification and implementation of the technologies and platforms.
• Targeted design activities that apply an appropriate workload placement strategy and maximise the benefit of cloud capabilities such as elasticity, serverless, containerisation etc.
• Best practice designs incorporating security principles (such as defence in depth and reduction of blast radius) that meet the Bank’s resiliency expectations.
• Solutions that appropriately balance risks and controls to deliver the agreed business and technology value.
• Adoption of standardised solutions where they fit. If no standard solutions fit, feed into their ongoing evolution where appropriate.
• Fault finding and performance issues support to operational support teams, leveraging available tooling.
• Solution design impact assessment in terms of risk, capacity and cost impact, inc. estimation of project change and ongoing run costs.
• Development of the requisite architecture inputs required to comply with the banks governance processes, including design artefacts required for architecture, privacy, security and records management governance processes.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others..
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.